Son of God (Adam)

I was deep in thought today and remembered that there is something strange about this teaching in the Bible of Jesus as Son. It is not that it’s outlandish and strange, but that it has several layers of depth to it. Being a biblical scholar at the Masters level, I thought I’d tackle this question in the manner it deserves to on my blog; simply and clearly. I hope all of you will be treated to one of classical Christianity’s major belief today. The belief in Jesus, not just as a child in Mary’s arms, but as the new Adam; the real Son of God.

Luke’s genealogy of Jesus traces Jesus’s ancestry to Adam in Genesis. This aspect of Luke’s writing was to demonstrate that the ancestry of Jesus was not just Jewish from David’s lineage as Matthew did, but from the ancestor of all mankind and that’s Adam. There are implications to this as we see throughout Luke’s account, he portrays Jesus as ministering to the Romans–apart from his immediate Jewish audience. It’s in this Gospel where from the very beginning we know that things are going to get a little bit interesting when a woman is told by God about the birth of the Messiah-and that’s big news indeed.

Some of you might be wondering why I am making a bit of a fuss about this issue, but I have to be clear this is very telling about God’s view of man (men & women) as his creation made in his own image and likeness. At the Fall, we realize that the fault was ultimately with Adam who had received God’s word and not kept it, but instead blamed Eve. For those of you who doubt this, if you go back to the Hebrew, you will find that it was only Adam who was banned from the Tree of Eternal Life-not Eve. It’s also the same reason why Adam understood his fate well enough to see that Eve was going to be the source of hope and named her “Mother of all living/Life-Giver”.

Enter Mary, and God is beginning his work of new creation, she is the one receiving the news about the coming of the Messiah. Oddly, God does not tell Joseph but he does make a point of ensuring that Mary knew. What was the response? “Be it unto me, according to your word”. Mary accepted her role and she became the most honored figure in Christian/Church history. That’s why the song, ‘Mary Did You Know’ has a a little zing to it if you catch its message. If the message becomes clear that through her faithful obedience, redemption had come.

It’s after her obedience that the angel, Gabriel tells her, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High…therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God”. The contrast in the book is made, as Adam was created by God directly and had him for a father Jesus was God’s Son by virtue of his identity as God–pre-existing Adam himself. Notice the term used by the angel, ‘Son of the Most High’. Yeah, that term is weighty especially after the next words from the angel’s mouth were ‘throne’, ‘reign’, ‘kingdom’ and finally ‘Son of God’, he was trying to say something to Mary.

We often miss this when looking at the identity of Jesus as the new Adam. We forget that the title ‘Son of God’ has ghastly implications. For the same way Adam was given authority over all creation, Christ is practically ruler over all creation; when Adam was made in the image and likeness of God, Christ is the exact imprint of God’s person, being and character; for as Adam was formed from the ground by God (having no human father), so was Christ formed in Mary’s womb without the need for a man. Jesus’ identity as Son in relation to Adam is key to understanding why in him “all things are made new”. For someone out there who doesn’t know him yet, I would just like to encourage you to know that he loved you so much that he risked it all by becoming a man, bearing our sinful nature and died just to make your life new.

He isn’t kidding when he says, “I love you”.

“Mary did you know that the child that you’ve delivered, would soon deliver you?”